Monday is my official day of rest. No coffee.

(warning... some 'female problems' talk in this blog. menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, etc. so, watch out.)

I enforced the 'day of rest' rule yesterday. Officially, I'm supposed to withdraw from caffeine, cold turkey, every Monday. That started back during the time period when I was working three twelve-hour days in a row at McDonald's (while using Vivarin pill fragments as my caffeine source) and then taking four days off. On Monday, I was supposed to recover from a weekend of work.

I did it yesterday, but I had a splitting headache by mid-afternoon. And all I did was lie in bed, and I got more achy, restless, and uncomfortable as time went by. The rule says that I can drink a cup of coffee at midnight ('when the moment is not right') on Monday-Tuesday if I've made it through the whole day without coffee. But I didn't - I made it till this morning.

When I had the first cup of coffee, I could feel it actually working. Usually it seems like the coffee is hardly having any effect at all.

Coffee is a medicinal herb. It doesn't just contain caffeine. It contains many other chemicals and drugs that are somewhat less important, but still have effects.

I won't be drinking coffee while pregnant - I'll stop. That means that I will probably notice a lot of chronic fatigue, and might not accomplish as much - and that worries me. I can't accomplish very much while using coffee, either, but at least I don't stay in bed all day. Anytime I've had roommates (in college), housemates, or family (when I lived with my parents), people have always gotten angry at me for staying in bed all day. I've had fights and arguments over it, and have even been sprayed in the face with a spray bottle filled with water (yes, that was very rude - it was a college roommate who was angry because, lucky me, I had the 'privilege' of sleeping all day long, while she had to study and do real work). So I'm not sure how my future husband will react to my having chronic fatigue.

Unfortunately, coffee is one of the things associated with menstrual cramps. This is important to know, because I want to have a natural childbirth without drugs. It isn't supposed to be excruciatingly painful. Anything that increases the pain of uterine contractions will make natural childbirth difficult.

While I'm at it, I will mention that natural childbirth in a hospital IS agonizingly painful, but if you do it at home, it's much easier. This is because in the hospital, they still expect you to lie on your back while giving birth. You can say, 'Don't give me any drugs,' but then you're still giving birth in an unnatural position. There's not much point in going to the hospital if you plan on doing a natural childbirth. There might be some hospitals that allow the woman to stand up and give birth in the standing or crouching position, but not all of them. I could be wrong about that, but that's the impression I get from reading.

Hospitals are shockingly clueless about pregnancy. I still can't believe it, every time I read about all the myths, all the mistaken beliefs they have, all the unnecessary drugging and caesarean sections and surgeries and other harmful practices.

CPD, Cephalopelvic disproportion, means that the baby's head is too big to fit through the pelvis. I want to say this is a myth, but I should say instead: it could happen, but it's very rare, and people are using this as an excuse to give caesarean sections ALL THE TIME, instead of very rarely. They don't even bother letting the mother stand up to see whether she can comfortably give birth in a better position. Sometimes they give this diagnosis weeks before the birth, and plan a caesarean ahead of time, to prevent any problems. But, as I said, it's a very common diagnosis, when in reality it should hardly ever happen. So if anyone ever tells you that you have CPD and you must get a caesarean, you should google 'cpd myth' or 'cephalopelvic disproportion myth' (no quotes) and read about it.

The pelvis is not just a solid piece of bone. It has flexible joints that allow it to open wider during the birthing process so that the child is able to go through. But this cannot happen if the woman is lying on her back with her feet in the stirrups the way they have been doing it in the hospitals over the past century.

Well, that all had to do with drinking coffee. I'm thinking about what will happen in the future, when I will go months and months without any coffee, and wondering how my husband will respond to a wife who has chronic fatigue and spends a lot of time lying around not doing much of anything. I worry about that a lot - it's the familiar situation that I hear about, where the husband is angry because his wife sits at home watching soap operas all day, while he works and brings in the money. I'm worried about divorce. I want a stable family that won't be broken apart a couple years after the first child is born.

Moving out of this apartment... going someplace where it won't be moldy... hoping that I will get better, instead of going someplace that makes me even sicker... I'd sleep in a tent, if I could, if I knew someplace that would let me do it, somewhere close enough to still drive to work. I'm not sure what I will be doing. The most important thing is to avoid going someplace that's just as unhealthy as this place. I will still probably have chronic fatigue, or a tendency to be less active than other people, but there are things like mold which can make that much, much worse.